Handcrafted in her studio in Taos, New Mexico, Anna Sheffield's newest works are difficult to categorise. They feel both ancient and contemporary: pieces whose function is not immediately obvious, but whose presence is difficult to ignore.
Sheffield calls them simply ‘objects'. The word gives them space to exist between categories. They are sculptures that participate in daily life. A vessel might hold a feather collected during a walk. A bell might mark the transition between one moment and another. A carved form might rest in the palm of a hand, inviting a few seconds of reflection. ‘The greatest luxury is to have anything in your life that makes you feel like you're slowing down and actually being present,' Sheffield says.
Anna Sheffield works with materials including bronze and ceramic to create temptingly tactile pieces
She jokingly describes the pieces as ‘witchy Carl Auböck', referencing the 20thcentury Austrian designer whose objects transformed everyday tools into moments of pleasure and attention. A bowl, bell or letter opener remained useful, but function was only the beginning. Auböck understood that objects could carry qualities more difficult to measure: humour, personality, memory and the small rituals created through use.
This relationship between material, meaning and daily life has shaped Sheffield's work for more than two decades. Before becoming one of the defining voices in contemporary fine jewellery, she studied sculpture in San Francisco. Jewellery unexpectedly became the place where her sculptural training, material knowledge, and personal sensibility became a livelihood. After moving to New York in 2002, she launched her ‘Bing Bang' line, translating those instincts into accessible pieces: tiny sculptural symbols, charms and declarations designed to be collected and layered. The response was meteoric, becoming what Sheffield describes as a ‘Barneys fashion moment', with the line finding audiences from New York to Tokyo and leading to collaborations with Marc Jacobs and Target.
'Heart’ vessel in burnished, smoked terra sigillata, in a hand-formed ceramic shell
In 2009, Sheffield started a collection under her own name, embracing the traditions of fine jewellery while bringing her own sensibility. Her rings honoured classic forms, but introduced unexpected stones, unusual colours and combinations that reflected a sculptor's attention to material, composition and emotional resonance. Jewellery offered a powerful education in the emotional life of objects. »
‘The greatest luxury is to have anything in your life that makes you feel like you're slowing down and actually being present'
A ring arrives with centuries of human behaviour already attached: promises, commitments, inheritance and memory. Eventually, Sheffield began questioning whether that same emotional power could exist within the quieter rituals of daily life.
‘Reflecting’ dish in sandcast bronze with black ceramic intention stone and bronze-set Mexican fire opal cabochon
However, after years of building a brand and a recognisable language within jewellery, Sheffield began to question where she fitted in creatively. ‘I'm not an artist anymore,' she remembers saying. ‘I'm a designer. I'm a brand. I'm a marketer. I'm an entrepreneur.'
During the pandemic, an artist residency at Pocoapoco in Oaxaca allowed Sheffield to confront these issues, returning her to sculpting and the physical process of making. Around the same time, her centre of gravity shifted from New York City to Taos, bringing her back to New Mexico, where she grew up, and to the landscape that had long shaped her understanding of materials. ‘New Mexico has always been my true north,' she says. Taos offered her a different kind of knowledge. The region has long attracted artists, creative types and experimental thinkers drawn by the possibility of living outside conventional systems of value. Its vast landscape and distance from traditional centres of culture created space for different ways of making, thinking and being. For Sheffield, it nurtured another part of the same imagination: the slower, stranger, more intuitive relationship with materials that had been the foundation of her creative life. The surrounding desert contains many elements that have appeared throughout her career: quartz, turquoise, copper and volcanic stone. The move was not a rejection of one life for another. It was a place where different parts of herself could finally exist together.
Obsidian orb on bronze donut, and pit-fired ‘Heart’ vessel with bronze and agate stopper
The works that emerged could only have been made after everything that came before. They carry the precision of jewellery but follow a different logic: one shaped by earth, intuition and the slow accumulation of meaning. Stones no longer wait to be set into rings. Metals no longer need to announce their value. Materials that once marked life's largest ceremonies are invited into quieter, daily exchanges. Sheffield speaks about the works with a mixture of seriousness and play. After years creating objects for the ceremonies we inherit, she is now exploring the rituals we create for ourselves.
Works in Anna Sheffield's Taos home
The artist that Sheffield thought she had left behind was never separate from the designer, marketer and entrepreneur she became. They were different expressions of the same imagination, shaped by different landscapes. New York taught her how to build worlds around objects. Taos returned her attention to the mysteries that made those objects matter in the first place. The diamond and the obsidian were never opposites. They were different forms of the same alchemy: earth transformed by the human desire to give it meaning.
This article appears in the August 2026, Creative America issue of Wallpaper*, available from 2 July in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today